In Conversation with Elise Sydendal
What roles should youth play in the present political arena and in discussions around environmental justice? In this interview, Elise Sydendal talks about her experience as a youth activist engaged with climate action and the green transition in Denmark. We also discuss the crucial role that youth should have in the climate debate and in designing our future.
Elise Sydendal is a Danish climate activist and a member of the Green Youth Movement. She is also a member of the National Youth Climate Council in her country. She has a background in Political Science. If you want to read some of the articles she has written you can click here.
DD: Hi Elise and thank you for joining us for our In Conversation with series. Can you briefly introduce yourself, tell us who you are and a bit about your experience as a political activist?
ES: My name is Elise Sydendal and I’ve been a climate activist in the Green Youth Movement for two years now. I started in the spring of 2021. I am also a member of the Youth Climate Council, which is a body appointed by the Danish Climate Ministry. Here, I represent the Green Youth Movement. We are a Danish movement fighting for a green, just future. We do demonstrations and work on campaigns trying to keep the climate debate at the top of the media agenda. We also lobby, by taking meetings with politicians and other relevant people and try to take all the power we can to make our voice heard. The Green Youth Movement is not associated with any political parties. We are quite big, possibly one of the largest youth organizations in Denmark, even though we don’t define ourselves as an organization. We’re more of a movement. We have a flat hierarchy, and we don’t have a membership system. We are activists. We just come in and do stuff.
DD: When would you say you became active on this topic? And what led you to take this more active approach to what you believe in or what you stand for?
ES: I think I became aware of the climate crisis when I was in high school. We had a course called Physical Geography where they were teaching about carbon emissions and the tipping points. I started thinking about why we are not doing anything about it. I didn’t really know what to do. When I moved to Copenhagen, I started going to demonstrations locally arranged by the Green Youth Movement and joined them. I did not know anyone in the group but was just so frustrated, and I needed to do something about it. I had so many emotions around this. It was so nice to meet others that were feeling and saying the same things, so I didn’t feel weird and alone. It was very nice to find this community where instead of sitting and crying we would be doing something about it.
DD: What kind of role do you think the Green Youth Movement has in the present political arena and in discussions around environmental justice?
ES: Sometimes, I think we’re a very big actor — and a very important voice in the climate debate. For example, the parties in the Danish Parliament know the Green Youth Movement and I think we have an influential voice. We are good at engaging with regular people so that they can understand if a policy is truly green or not. We also get called immediately if there is a need for a young voice to be included in debates about the green transition. But at the same time, I also doubt at times whether politicians truly care. Throughout the years, we have had so many demonstrations, and I feel that they’ve gotten more and more immune to them. We really need people a little bit older than us, maybe like my parents’ age to tune in with us, as this could help to get politicians to listen to our requests.
DD: What do you think makes youth and youth organizations, relevant in the climate agenda? Why should we listen and follow your lead?
ES: I believe that in all political topics, we should be listening more to youth. Older people have disproportionally more power in our society. In the climate debate, this is particularly striking because this cause doesn’t really affect the people sitting inside the parliament who belong to older generations. They will not live with the consequences of the decisions they have taken today. I think we need to design a new future and it’s only fair that the people we’re designing it for (which are young people) should be a part of that process.
DD: And what do you think has to change in order for this to be different? How can we make youths’ voices and needs part of the actions and the solutions?
ES: There are a lot of institutional things that can be done like for instance giving us power, real power. As an example, the Youth Climate Council in practice has no real power at all. We get to have a meeting with the minister once a year, but he has no responsibility to even listen. He could literally just go out and pretend he never had the meeting.
If politicians really wanted to include us, they should have some courage and give us real power. By that, I mean that they should at least be voting on the recommendations we put forward. In this sense, better-institutionalized youth involvement would be a start. But other things have to change too. As a society, we need more compassion and empathy. We are very greedy. We think we can’t live without certain things, we can’t live without eating meat, or driving our cars. But actually, we can. And right now, by not making responsible choices we are taking opportunities and freedom from other people in the Global South and from future generations. We need to start training our ability to feel something towards these people, even though they feel far away. I feel like this is the biggest challenge we are facing, which is a humanitarian challenge in the end.
DD: What do you think intergenerational justice means and what role does it play in your activism?
ES: It means a lot. One of the reasons I started being an activist was because I saw all of these young people, like 11 years old, striking on Fridays and it just really hurt my heart. They shouldn’t be doing this right now. They should just be in school, and happy. It shouldn’t be their responsibility to care about this. And yet, we are led by people that only care about profit and popularity. Profit is apparently more important than securing a safe life for us in the future. At the same time, we can’t just wait until the next generation comes to change the system, because the actions we are taking now are literally defining their futures. We need to start having discussions about what guides our actions and guides our moral compass.
DD: I think there’s a lot of anxiety that can come with discussing these things and you can feel a bit hopeless and lost. But just knowing that there are movements like the ones you are part of being organized, and taking action brings hope…
ES: Yeah. But that’s not enough though. I’ve just heard that so many times, and I don’t want to be people´s hope, I want you to do something also. For instance, I often hear from older family members things like “oh, it’s fine. You know, you will fix it, I have hope in your generation” and I understand but, what about you? I think that we have to earn our hope. We can’t just have our hope in someone else, we all need to do positive things and not just leave it to the youth. We need to stop expecting youth to be responsible for change because we are not in the power positions to make the change anyways. We need everyone to push for this.
In Conversation With is an interview series in which we host researchers, practitioners, activists, and others who are engaged in hands-on initiatives, projects, and similar actions in their local environments. We would like to give space to emerging topics and hear more from those directly engaged in initiatives seeking to make our urban areas safer, more inclusive, and sustainable.
The interviews are moderated by our project communication officer Daniela Dominguez
